“Vampires shading someone from the sun.” She shakes her head against the pillow. “Our lives are absurd.”
I kiss her. She bites my lower lip, wraps her legs around me, and pulls me deeper.
Faster now. Just her body and mine and a wave that’s been building since the shutters opened.
Her jaw drops open. The sound she makes is lower, pulled from somewhere deep. The flush starts at her chest and climbs.
I follow her. My face pressed to her neck, her hands in my hair, the sun on my back.
Her body pulls tight around me and the bond floods with what she's feeling and I stop holding anything back.
The release moves through me in a long wave, unhurried the way everything this morning has been unhurried, and I feel it land in places that have nothing to do with my body. Her breath against my throat. The sun on skin that spent centuries avoiding it. Her pulse and mine running together beneath us.
I stay where I am. I don't move. Neither does she.
We lie in the light. Her head on my chest.
The sunlight tracks across the ceiling. Slow. The kind of thing I haven’t watched in a very long time. Angle and shadow marking time, the way clocks used to before I stopped needing them.
Whatever pattern is forming, I don't yet have enough data to see its shape.
The sun moves. The morning passes.
We stay.
The compound wakes at once.The operational rhythm of the night reasserting itself after a day that belonged entirely to Celeste and me.
I’m already in the conference room when Marcellus walks in. He looks at me, then at Celeste.
“Alexei?” I ask.
“Awake. Cooperative. No issues.” Marcellus pauses. “He asked when you were coming back.”
“Celeste and I will see him.”
Marcellus’s gaze moves to Celeste.
“Julian should observe,” he says.
“Agreed. Outside the room. Recording.”
He nods.
Julian arrives with his tablet. He briefs us on Dr. Dalton’s full evaluation.
Most of it confirms what I’d already determined last night. The sensory processing I clocked within minutes of sitting down. The memory that surfaced in the precision of every answer he gave, the way he retrieved details without searching for them.
What Dalton adds is the clinical picture. Visual acuity that detects UV and infrared spectrums. Auditory range that extends into frequencies no vampire should access. And the memory isn’t trained recall. It’s structural. Total, persistent, involuntary. Everything Alexei has ever seen or heard is stored and accessible. No deletion. No decay.
Then there’s the secondary finding. Muscular density inconsistent with the rest of the profile. Higher than either his frame or his species should carry.
Julian taps the screen and leaves the note visible. I read it. I don’t comment.
“He’s a living database,” Celeste says. “No paper trail. No files to seize. Everything stored in a body Konstantin controls.”
"A body that walked into our compound on its own," Julian says. "And he's been inside the farms."
Marcellus leads us down.
